Dell Inspiron Windows7 (Win7 i5 7000 7520 Windows 7) Laptop Stuff
No apologies for the long title; as an x mvp and long time user I am well aware of how long it takes to search these forums for a relevant entry. Hi everyone and hope you are well.
I have several questions that personally I could never answer regarding DELL hardware or loaded software and I have looked around but can find no answers! So -
I have installed TI2013 without problems on this 7520 machine and made several backups of it in various forms the first one being the unnamed partition, recovery partition, and System C, to an external drive. Can I use this as a recovery backup?
Can I simply back up C:System and recover it without noticing the difference?
If I add partitions using either Win7 or Disk Director, does this make a difference?
Using XP it was very simple on a 'normal' machine. I have other issues using Disk Director but thats another thing.
Many Thanks
Hi Colin, many thanks for your reply.
I did make full disk image backups.
This system has the boot files within the RECOVERY partition it appears, this is a brand new installation not an upgrade.
Adding partitions has been odd but ok - I say odd because using DD i could resize C down and then add a new partition and others however the very first partition I added would always be called 'local volume'. All the other partitions were as I named them. The way I got around this was to use Win7 disk management itself - I resized C down to 100GB then created a new partition called DATA using Win 7. Then I kicked off DD and could do what I wanted with all naming and stuff working as expected apart from the sizes of partitions are not identical when looking in DD / Win7!
I have added some screen shots.
What I want to achieve is similar to what i did with my girlfriends system which was a Zoostorm - it had its own way of partitioning things and booting and it was a pain - what I did was to back it all up and then reformatted the entire disk. I then restored only the sytem C. The PC would not boot of course but a simple Windows repair disk did the trick by installing the boot files. Sorted.
I am not so confident with this new lappy!
I look forward to your comments
Mark
oh yes, the old 'unnamed partition' has now become 'local volume' just to confuse things even more and i am not sure how when or why - In fact I have no idea!
Have to add my doggy Tessy (in picture) died peacefully earlier this year. She was a sixteen year old Tibetan Terrier and was far cleverer than me, and far muchly more pretty than me, God Bless her.
Hey, thanks for support. I'll do it myself and not report back, bye bye.
Hi Bin,
Glad to see you are still involved with the computers.
When you have the same dog for a very long time, they become part of the family. I'm sure you will miss her but at her age, she lived much longer than most dogs--from what I understand.
As to your local or unmamed volume, open Windows Disk management and use that to add your own volume name but don't add a drive letter as you want to keep it unlettered if it had no letters in the past.
If you have disk backup of all partitions, you should be able to restore any or all the partitions.
Hi Grover mate, many thanks for replying, I miss your friendly and concise answers.
My partner is in hospital at the moment otherwise I would provide a more wholesome reply.
God Bless and keep you updated in a bit ok